Dan Hall: How Rush Limbaugh could help out America

Sunday

Oct 26, 2008 at 12:01 AMOct 26, 2008 at 9:15 PM

I recently had an epiphany: Rush Limbaugh needs to get a life.

Dan Hall

One day last week, I walked the hills near Canandaigua (N.Y.) Lake, on a rare break from my computer screen – a world-weary place where I spend entirely too much time. My dog Magellan dashed off in one of her joyous but always futile attempts to catch a squirrel. The glow of sunshine on the golden leaves of a hickory tree next to a waterfall caught my eye, and I stopped to contemplate the beauty of God’s works.

There, I had an epiphany: Rush Limbaugh needs to get a life.

Limbaugh has always struck me as an angry man, but in the last couple of weeks, he has worked himself into an especially terrible state. He sneers. He snarls. He roars. He sounds like he is about to explode. Barack Obama pals around with terrorists. Barack Obama is a socialist.

The reason Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama is that both of them are black.

The first two of those assertions are paranoid. The third is racist.

You would think that by now, “pals around with terrorists” would be a smear that has lost its stickiness. There was nothing radical about the work Obama and ex-terrorist William Ayers did, along with a close friend of Ronald Reagan and many of the top business leaders in Chicago, on a program to improve that city’s inner-city schools.

The “socialist” smear is equally absurd. When the man now known as Joe the Plumber asked an honest question about taxes on small-business owners, Obama gave an honest answer: He hopes to raise taxes on people earning more than $250,000 per year. He added something to the effect that we “need to spread the wealth around a little.” Basically, he would reverse the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2004. Those tax cuts redistributed wealth, too, only they redistributed it upward instead of downward.

As for Limbaugh’s assertion that race was the reason Powell endorsed Obama: Where did he get that? He only assumed so, because both men have dark skin. He didn’t ask Powell.

Maureen Dowd of The New York Times did ask Powell. He told her he resents many things about this year’s election campaign. Especially, he resents the insidious lie, sometimes said aloud, but more often darkly whispered, that Obama is a Muslim and that Muslims are evil.

Powell himself has dealt with prejudice in his life. He knows, too, how anti-Islamic bigotry is destroying America’s reputation in so many nations of the Mideast, Africa and Asia.

What finally pushed him over the edge, he told Dowd, was when he opened a magazine three weeks ago and saw a picture of an American mother pressing her head against the gravestone of her son, a 20-year-old soldier who died fighting in Iraq.

On the headstone were engraved his name, Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, and a crescent and star honoring his Islamic faith.

“I stared at it for an hour,” Powell told Dowd. “Who could debate that this kid lying in Arlington with Christian and Jewish and nondenominational buddies was not a fine American?”

McCain himself has spoken out against the extremists, though he ought to do it more. There is a right-wing army out there, on the Internet and radio talk shows, that is obsessed with hatred toward Obama. Its members campaign not through honest debate but by appealing to our darkest instincts.

I have not heard every Limbaugh show over the past few weeks, but I have listened a lot. I cannot remember him even once raising any subject other than his vision of the evil threat posed by Obama.

Think about that: It’s an endless rant, four hours a day, five days a week, and that does not include the hours he must spend preparing, before he goes on the air each day. For Limbaugh, it’s all about Obama the Evil One, all of the time. Other right-wing talk show hosts, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and Sean Hannity, are much the same.

Some Democrats want to push them off the air by restoring the old “fairness doctrine” to radio and television broadcasts. That would be a big mistake. Free speech should mean free speech, even when the speech is crude and hateful.

Still, understand this: Barack Obama is not “un-American.” The campaign of prejudice and fear being waged against him is un-American.

If Obama wins, the purveyors of bigotry and chauvinism will have sabotaged his presidency
before it even starts. If McCain wins, he will have to deal with the anger of millions of people all across the country who will feel they have been profoundly wronged. That will happen just as the nation enters the chaos of what promises to be one of the worst financial crises
in our history.

Here is some personal advice to Limbaugh and friends. Get a life. Get some sunshine. Learn to see the world in more benevolent ways. You will do something good for yourselves and your country.

Dan Hall is the former editorial page editor of Messenger Post Newspapers. E-mail him at danwriting@aol.com.

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